Lord Heseltine: My Lords, it behoves someone rising from these Benches to say nice things about the Prime Minister, and I want unreservedly to salute a judgment she got 100% right, which was to put the Brexiteers in charge of the negotiations for our severance with Europe. I advocated that in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, and I did it for two reasons: first, because if they had not been put in charge they would have blamed whoever was for the resulting challenges that emerged; and, secondly, I had unbounded faith that if those particular people were put in charge, they would make a resounding nonsense of it.
It is quite clear that those two judgments were manifestly right. The first person to spot how right they were was the Prime Minister herself. Those of us who have lived through the traumas of the past 40 or 50 years of public life, knew that when Olly Robbins was moved from David Davis’s wing to Number 10 the game was up. Some of us remember Percy Cradock and Alan Walters—I notice my very good noble friend Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, is not in his place and, sadly, Geoffrey Howe is not with us at all—and when I saw the movement of Olly Robbins, I knew the game was up. I had a very similar experience when I was Secretary of State when a civil servant from the Ministry of Defence was moved to Number 10. I knew that that meant that all the gossip, intrigue and dirt within the ministry would be purveyed to Number 10 to my disadvantage, so I laid down a very simple rule. I said, “I am very happy that this civil servant from the ministry in Number 10 can communicate in any way and properly with the Ministry of Defence, but only in the presence of my private secretary”. Three weeks later, he was back in the Ministry of Defence, and that was a wise protection on my part.
After the protracted period of the Brexiteers in charge, we have seen what Brexit really amounts to in their mind. There is no plan, there is no detail. There are phrases, as the noble Lord, Lord Birt, said, but there is no reality behind the rhetoric and the emotion. The question that has to be asked is: what is Brexit? We know Brexit means Brexit—that is a very clear statement—but what actually is Brexit? The noble Lord, Lord Newby, went through the options. Boris Johnson started with the White Paper some time ago. How good it was, he said, but that moved on. We then had the Chequers document. I glanced at it and said, “This is dead. It won’t work”. Within a very short period it has been disowned by the Europeans, the right wing of the Conservative Party and, doubtless, parts of the Labour Party as well. Self-evidently, we narrow the field down to, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, an amended Chequers announcement or no deal. If this House cannot tell me what Brexit it, if  the Government cannot tell me, if the newspapers cannot tell me and everybody has got their own version—600 versions here, another 600 versions there and thousands outside—what did the people vote for? What was in their mind? How are we, as servants of the people, as people wishing to implement the referendum, to do what the public want, to know what they want when we do not know ourselves? It is no surprise to me that growing in volume and articulation is the demand: “Let the people have another chance. Let them say when they have seen the facts”. The interesting thing is that that they are now all saying that the facts were never there. We were not told.
That is not true. All the facts were laid out. All the warnings were there. Everything was in front of them, all within a giant smokescreen called Project Fear. Every warning, however factual, however realistic, was out, gone, just a scare. A lot of people believed that it was just a scare. And there was the bribe, not only a scare but 850 million quid a week—all blown of course. Nevertheless, how could anyone conceivably make a judgment about something we cannot define for them until we know what the deal looks like? And we cannot know what the deal looks like until the Europeans have said what they are prepared to do. In my view, there is a growing argument for another referendum.
I think I have some idea of what Brexit is. I think it is two things. First, it is the frustration of eight years of post-2008 stagnating living standards. All my political experience tells me that there is a tolerance of limited dimension in the electorate for frozen living standards. They do not ask for much from us, but they ask us to try to keep the show on the road, keep prosperity rising and make sure that the country is relatively well run. For eight years following the 2008 crash, we have failed to deliver that. Not that I blame the British, because the Americans and the Europeans failed in the same way. We went on a great spending spree—personally, collectively, industrially, commercially and in the public sector—there had to be an adjustment, and people do not like the consequences. Of course, you do not deal with that by the Brexit solution, which makes us poorer. As Sir John Major articulately reminded us—something that the Government had already said—we will not only be poorer, we will remain poorer, and those who will be the poorest are those who voted most persistently to be made poorer, without knowing what they were doing.
As the noble Lords, Lord Newby and Lord Radice and, I think, my noble friend Lord Birt said, the right solution is to ask the second question about Brexit and see whether there is a way to revisit the fundamentals. Immigration has not raised its voice very articulately this afternoon. I think that if you have the frustration to which I have referred, there has to be someone to blame, and the person who is the easiest to blame is the foreigner. You cannot argue they are taking your job, because they all have jobs. You cannot argue that they are all a lot of scroungers coming here to live in our welfare state because they are all in work. But there is something about immigration on too high a scale that challenges people’s willingness to accept the change it involves.
That is not a British problem. It is all over Europe. It is called Le Pen, and the AFG in Germany. The Dutch have it. It is Donald Trump in America, who has played ruthlessly with the issue. In my humble submission, we have to understand that the electronicalisation—the communications revolution—of the world means that everywhere, in every darkest corner of poverty, they know how prosperous we are. The most energetic, the most talented, the most adventurous of them see the honeypot. We are the honeypot, and they are coming here. They are not coming to land off the Mediterranean, in Greece, Italy or Spain; they are coming here to northern Europe. There is an opportunity, in looking at Brexit and Europe, to see whether we can become engaged in a dialogue with the Europeans which recognises that this issue engages us all, and that we will have to address it in one way or another. I have always believed that Stalin made a terrible mistake in closing the wall. If he had left it open, we would have had to build the wall.
In another context, in another generation, there will be the same issue—they will keep coming. I have one question for the Minister. The Government have total control over the non-European immigration figures. The European figures are going down, with all the economic consequences of which we are aware. What are the Government doing about the rising non-European figures, which have soared to replace the Europeans going home? Is it just possible that they are not doing anything significant because they do not want to expose the dependence of our social services and our economy on the creaming of talented, energetic and skilled people? I say to the Government: wait until you get to the undeveloped world with which you will be trying to do all these great trade deals, and tell them, “Everything is all right. You train all these people at great taxpayers’ expense, in the poverty-ridden world in which you live, and we will then take them here because they are the only ones we want”.
Brexit is a disaster. I accept—I am afraid in conflict with my noble friend Lord Hunt, of whom I am a great admirer—that there is no compromise with Brexiteers. There never has been and there never will be. For my money, here we stand and fight.

Lord Balfe: My Lords, may I first declare my interests? Next year will be the 40th year that I have been in Brussels—25 years in the European Parliament and since then as chair of the 28-member voluntary pension fund of the Parliament, as a member of its Former Members Association executive, and as a board member of the charitable foundation that it supports. So I am an eternal disappointment to my noble friend Lord Forsyth, for a start. I am also vice-president of BALPA, the pilots union, and very much welcome the points made by the noble Baroness opposite.
I shall start by repeating, or firming up, some of those points. The White Paper recognises the special needs of aviation, and I pay tribute to the Minister who was formerly in this job and his successor, my noble friend Lady Sugg, for the attention they have paid to the representations received from BALPA. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, said, the pilots are looking for a Canadian-style agreement with a Swiss-style involvement with the European Aviation Safety Agency. However, they are concerned because the principle “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” is stopping meaningful conversations at official and regulatory level. It is no longer sensible not to start those conversations. I do not expect the Minister to have the answer to this in his brief, but I would welcome an assurance that he will write to me, and possibly copy in the noble Baroness, on this subject—in particular on the limited subject of whether we can get further discussions going.
My second point is also taken from the good book, the Command Paper. The second paragraph of the Prime Minister’s foreword to the White Paper talks about,
“ending the days of sending vast sums of money to the EU every year”.
I contend that we do not send vast sums of money to the EU every year. We have let this idea come into our national discourse in a way that it should not have done. The principle of the EU—a fundamentally sound one—is that generally speaking the richer member states are contributors to the budget and the poorer states are beneficiaries. Our net contribution of £8.9 billion, which has been mentioned, is around 1% of UK government expenditure. The cost of what is called the settlement after we leave is estimated in the House of Commons briefing paper as between £35 billion and £39 billion—in other words, four years’ worth of full payments straight away.
The cost of the EU per head of population depends on the exchange rate, but my figure is £130. I heard a slightly different figure earlier, but it is in that ball park. We are not the biggest contributor, by a long way. Per head of population we are number six. The countries above us are, in order, Germany first, Denmark second, France third, the Netherlands fourth, and Sweden fifth. They all pay more than we do per head  of population—as, incidentally, does Norway, which I add to the list just in case we want a Norwegian-style deal.
What is happening here is a good basic principle of international relations, which is that richer nations are helping to support smaller nations. So when we talk of bringing “our money back”, we are substantially talking about withdrawing from such programmes as those which support the development of poorer regions through the regional fund. Is this what the Government want? Do they want to desert the new democracies of eastern Europe? Is this now their programme? Do we want to save money by withdrawing from the Erasmus programme that supports students, or are we going to carry on with it so that there will not be any savings from Brexit anyway? I assume that the money that is spent through the EU on aid will continue to be spent, because it comes out of our aid commitment, so that will also not be saved.
Have the Government counted up how much it will cost to participate in the various agencies, numbered at 62 in this debate, and policies that, according to the White Paper, we wish to join? I see all of the supposed saving of this modest amount disappearing before my eyes.
We talk about a trade agreement but we will not get one without paying for it. It is not a free trade agreement—it will be a costed trade agreement, as Norway has found. Do we think we will be paying more or less into the budget than its £135 per head per year? How much better off than Norway will we be? I predict that we will not be any better off at all. We have already said that we are going to keep all sorts of programmes going, and that will cost us money. That is not a bad thing except that we are withdrawing money from a lot of people who need it.
If we decide that we are going to crash out, or whatever we call it, what message will we be sending to British public servants who work for international organisations? International organisations at the Foreign Office used to have a programme to get people through the concours so they could work for the European Union. Will we be saying to the brightest brains in Britain, “Go and work for the international organisation; if we get fed up with it we will desert you and leave you without your pensions, your pay and your promotion prospects”? Is that the Government’s message to the brightest and best in Whitehall, who used to be encouraged to go into international bodies?
I ask the Minister to look at the facts behind this. I think that he will find that we are indulging in a very paltry saving for a truly disastrous policy.